The A-Poop-alypse

Memories come from the weirdest places. Sometimes, the bad things from our past end up becoming the stuff of legend. And when I write “stuff,” I mean really gross stuff.

Leakey: A town name? Or foreshadowing?
I spent some time in Leakey recently and it reminded me of the early 1980s, when sportswriter Richard C. Oliver and I were in college.

His mom owned a cabin north of town, high atop a mountain ridge. It would take 40 minutes, after driving off the US 83 blacktop, to crawl across the primitive road, over creek beds and scaling hillsides, before we looped around to get to the cabin. It had a specatacular view of the Hill Country.

Every few weekends, he would invite my wife and I to go with him to visit his mom. Even after we had our first child, we loved going to the Land of 1,100 Springs.

And that memory reminded of the most fateful trip we ever made to Leakey. It’s a trip that my son, now in his 30s, doesn’t remember, but one which Richard, my wife Sandra and I will never forget.

A river of you-know-what runs through it
Two things happened a lot out there — rock slides and the springs never stopped flowing.

The boy was 18 months old. He was (and still is) a good kid. He was always laughing, stumbling around, throwing rocks and acting like a knucklehead, i.e. typical boy.

He was really feeling good for the first day of this three-day trip. We were having fun. But after that, he slowly turned cranky. He didn’t sleep well. He didn’t want to eat. He had to be held constantly.

He wasn’t feverish. He hadn’t been injured. He just wasn’t feeling well.

Something is rotten is Denmark (“Denmark” might be a metaphor)
After three days, we left. The kid went into the child seat in the back of our 1978 Chevy Chevette. Oliver sat alongside him. We made our way down the mountain and started the three-hour trip home.

From U.S. 83, we turned onto Ranch Road to head to Kerrville, 42 miles away.

Shortly after turning onto that road, it occurred to Sandra and I that we hadn’t changed a dirty diaper in a couple of days.

Almost simultaneously, Oliver said something like “Hey, I think Sean is, uh, taking care of business.”

And so it began
Yes, he was. And his inability to complete that act, we decided, had been the cause of his irritability in Leakey.

At first, things went normally. No problems.

Then things got weird, to wit: It didn’t stop. I mean, it did not stop.

Soon, the boundaries of diaper and clothing had been breeched.

Oliver had a look of astonishment on his face.

“He’s still going…” Oliver said, stunned.

Everything coming out nicely, thank you
He was right. It continued. The child seat’s perimeter was no longer viable. Leakage became a threat as the child seat’s plastic barriers were breached. There was spillage. Soon, it became a tsunami of waste on the car upholstery.

Oliver was trapped. The poop closed in on him. It was iffy there for a second. Imagine Pompeii without lava, or with really, really smelly lava. Oh the humanity!

As we freaked out, the boy continued to make odd faces. His eyes crossed. Business was continuing unabated.

Out on upholstery, it inched closer and closer to Oliver.

Almost a flashback
Since the baby was born, Oliver had been a special friend. He had held the baby, fed the baby, and even played with the baby at our home, at the beach, and most recently at the cabin.

But dirty diapers don’t know loyalty. They don’t know the meaning of human decency. All they know is to stink and destroy.

Then, just as Oliver seemed doomed, gravity took over. The appalling wall of disgust stopped as Newtonian forces pulled it down to the floorboard.

Soon after hitting the floorboard, the fountain of filth stopped. We were speechless. When we looked up, the baby was laughing, as well he should.

The fecal danger was over, even though we had a huge mess to clean up.

A narrow escape
We pulled into the Bonanza in Kerrville – long since closed, though I don’t think there was any connection between that and this – and we got to work.

My wife changed the baby, but Oliver was changed, too. He’s still not quite right, even to this day.

Our food at Bonanza – after I went through two bundles of paper towels – tasted better than any food we had ever eaten. Was it because Bonanza was great? Was it because we had spent three days in wilderness?
Or was it because we had survived the most base of all fears – a poop-apalypse of extraordinary magnitude? And, despite the smell that lingered in that car for a week, we lived to tell about it?

We’ll never know, but we’ll never forget how close we came to drowning in poop.